CNN's Miles O'Brien Reveals Cell Phone Number

From the The Risk of Bragging about your Blackberry on Live TV department …

I am a news addict. I wake up early in the morning, and watch news for a couple of hours before I go to work. Sometimes, I get lucky, and catch a news story which I can talk about in the economics classes I teach. And, sometimes I get lucky and catch Miles O'Brien revealing his cellphone number on live TV!

Mr. O'Brien and another person (I guess one of CNN's very knowledgable(!) tech reporters) were talking about how Blackberry is the greatest thing since sliced bread when Mr. O'Brien suddenly felt the urge to demonstrate how fast he could whip up a message and send it. Lo and behold, he typed an empty message with the subject line "Test", and sent it to the other guy in the studio. When the other guy received the message, the camera dutifully zoomed in on his Blackberry to show us that he had indeed received the message.

Since the message body was empty, Mr. O'Brien's signature, which was automatically appended, was displayed for the whole world to see. The signature did include both his cell phone number and office number. Both were shown for a few seconds.

The first thought I had was to call him on his cell number (does that ring on the Blackberry?), and advise him that, since he is somewhat of a celebrity, it was probably not a very good idea to broadcast his contact information to the whole world. Then, I thought better of it, and decided to post the screen capture here. Note that the actual numbers are blurred in the picture. You didn't think I really wanted to be responsible for a bunch of crank calls to Mr. O'Brien regardless of what I think of him as an anchor, did you?